Reply #39: I understand

[m berst]

I am sure that all of that has happened and I am not disagreeing with your experience of it.

"Rafterman's bad experiences" I would call it. I just don't think that it is racism you are talking about, nor that we can learn anything about racism from your experiences.

Unfair stuff happens. You assume that if you are treated unfairly by a person who happens to be an African American that it somehow has something to do with racism or race relations. Statistics don't support you, so we have nothing but your view. Since you are convinced that some African Americans have it out for you, this could be skewing your experience. When I was managing a staff I would not have wanted to have a white person on staff who was on the look out for reverse racism because that would not be a very good attitude for working closely with people from a variety of backgrounds.

I would not be too thrilled with any staffer who ran to me and said "so and so did such and such because I am ___" nor did any Hispanic or African American staffer EVER run to me with a whiney complaint about any white person. I DID however have whites on a couple of ocassions run to me with this kind of nonsense. They picked it up from Rush - how to be a persecuted white person and blame your problems on someone else. If there were a consistent pattern of behavior that was impairing the effectiveness of the staff, I would want to root it out whatever it was. I certainly would not take on solving social issues in the work environment.

People are people. If you are having problems in your individual life on a personal level with people, it is not because of race unless you are introducing it. Most people don't care, and don't personalize it, nor should they. If I had an employee who was personalizing anything the way that you are doing here with race, that would be a red flag for me that the person could potentially be trouble, no matter who they were.

Once in a while I had a new hire, usually a young African American or Hispanic man, with a chip on his shoulder - "whites are out to get me." My response was, "you bet they are, but here you are judged as a man and by the quality of your work. Ready to go to work?" Done. But the couple of white guys I had problems with moped around for weeks imagining that their problems at work were because their African American, or their Hispanic, or their gay, or their female co-workers "had it in for them" because they were white males. Uh huh.

So that is the management view on "reverse racism" with no bleeding heart liberal crap involved. We ran a tough-nosed bottom line no-nonsense business in a very comptetitve field and I was required to make decisions based on what worked in the real world, not a political ideology, and I had ZERO time for "oppressed white males" with their complaints of "discrimination."